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Stories of the Sheffler Family as your ancestors might tell them. They don't remember all the details - it's been a long time - but they make up for it in perspective. The articles below are both real and imagined. Letters and documents revealing details of our colonial era immigrant family and the generations that followed.

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Sunday, November 28, 2004

Claude LaVern Cripe, born 1892 - Part 6

[ NOTE - The following is transcribed from an audiotape recording made by Claude LaVern Cripe on July 4, 1967.]

[ PART 6 OF 6 ]

Reprise of earlier days...



By request I make the following recording:


Uh, starting in the year 19 hundred and 8, when I went to Colorado to uh, stay with my father for a little while, uh, things were very primitive. Uh, when I arrive at his place he lived about 5 miles from town, and I inquired the way out.


Seems like they had no taxicabs, I walked the 5 miles to his place.


I got there and he appeared to be very glad to see me - because he had, I suppose some work to be done that summer. And uh, he had a, uh, one room cottage and uh he immediately - uh he had a cot and he immediately took some boards and made a bunk over that cot and that way we saved a little room. I slept up next to the roof. Summertime was a little bit warm but we didn’t pay no attention to that.


And uh, he had a uh, little sheet metal stove, made out of sheet iron if you know what I mean, very thin like stovepipe. And uh there’s no wood there in Eastern Colorado, uh, you know them days there weren’t very much coal either and people didn’t have much money to buy coal with either. And uh when they did buy coal it was in the winter time and that was to keep warm.


And what did we cook with? Just in case you know what it is, cow chips! And uh, no bread, we had no bread. Him- he didn’t bake bread and I didn’t know how to bake bread. So uh, for breakfast we made biscuits … roasted with cow chips. And, we also cooked. We fried our bacon ... with cow chips. Brother I’m tellin’ ya it was a hard way to – hard way to serve the lord but we done her.


And uh, anyway we st- I stayed there that Summer and that Fall I got on the train and left.


And, up in the Colorado mountains, in the Rockies, lots of Indian camps up in there and in the Wintertime they camped along the railroad so’s that they could get their food better. In the Summertime they faded away into the hills and, and uh, hunted their meat and dried it, made jerky to live on in the Wintertime. They was lots of those camps along the railroad. The railroads went through the Indian reservations at that time.


And uh they was all very primitive, and uh, in uh, in these railroad camps them days, they had uh, cooks or bakers, who baked for the whole crew. And uh, of course the Indians they lived on the reservations - got a little pension from the government - and they used to buy, uh homemade bread from those railroad camps the cooks, that’s the way they made their uh, that’s where they got their tips from.

And uh, it went that way all the way over into Oregon and uh, along the uh, along the uh, Columbia River. Uh the Indians would trade uh, fish, salmon, you see they fished all the year round and they would trade fish to the railroad men for goodies off of their uh, table like bread, and uh cookies, and uh, things like that. Them days we didn’t have any doughnuts, they was known then as fried cakes.


Did you ever eat fried cakes you kids? I don’t know whether they did or not. These kids don’t know what fried cakes are. They’re doughnuts to them. See? That’s what I’m talking about! (Shut ‘er)


[End of tape of Claude LaVern Cripe, original recorded July 4, 1967. Copy provided by Claude’s granddaughter Ms. Marylee Olson, Twin Lakes Michigan.]


Transcript © 2004 Donald J. Sheffler. All Rights Reserved.
Don@Sheffler.org
http://www.sheffler.org/


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